This Bloody Game

by Dan Schiro

  Aurelia laughed, the light around her dazzling. “But I’m still having fun!”

  Kangor grabbed her arm, his palm sizzling on her white-hot skin. He used his powerful legs to leap up onto the ramp and jerk her along like a captured green firefly. Orion and Zovaco called their spellblade weapons back and followed, stray pulse bolts humming between them and exploding in showers of sparks on the Void Phantom.

  “Close the ramp, close the ramp,” Orion yelled as he sprawled forward on the cabin floor.

  “Copy that,” said Katherine Vanlith. The steely woman hunched over the control dash with her hands clutching the navigation wheel. “Everyone strap into crash couches, now!”

  Orion felt the slight lurch of acceleration before the ship’s inertial dampeners kicked in. As he and the others strapped into the crash couches that lined the ship’s cabin, the hot green glow around Aurelia dimmed. For a moment she stood over Orion and looked at him crossly, and then her expression softened. “Did I go too far?”

  “Yeah,” Orion breathed. “Just a touch.”

  Aurelia ran a hand over her short, bronze-streaked head tentacles and exhaled a weary sigh. “Sorry… about… that.” Her eyes rolled back in her head, and the Lady of the Jade Way fell forward.

  Orion reached up, catching her with a grunt. As he cradled her crumpled body, Orion watched Aurelia age what seemed like 70 years in a few seconds. Her radiant green flesh shriveled, sagged and wrinkled, and her large, almond-shaped eyes shrank back in her skull, the brassy irises filling with glossy clouds. Orion knew this was the true face of Aurelia Deon, an ancient creature now undisguised by veils of hard light. “Just rest, AD,” Orion said. He maneuvered her into the seat next to him and strapped her in. “Just rest. We’re almost home free.”

  “The hell we are,” snapped Vanlith. “They just scrambled pursuit fighters from an airfield next to Wormrock. We’ve got four Blue Comets after us.”

  Orion knew the model — a turbo-charged military design armed to the teeth with pulse cannons and thermite missiles. “Activate the shift-skin,” Orion called. “Mervyn bought a stealth ship for a reason!”

  “What a wonderful idea,” Vanlith said as a near-miss thermite explosion rocked the ship. “If only the shift-skin hadn’t been damaged back at the prison.”

  “Well,” Orion muttered. “That was kind of key.”

  “Yeah,” Vanlith barked. “Heat sinks are wasted and so is the spectrum reflector. But we’re not dead yet.” The viewscreen in front of her turned from gray to starry black as they broke free from the atmosphere, but an inset image showed the four dart-like blue fighters close behind. “We just need to lose them the old-fashioned way until the manacite drive has time to spin up.”

  “What did you have in mind?” Orion asked as Bavara-5’s shattered moon filled the main viewscreen and ship’s collision warnings blared. “You’re not thinking—”

  “You said you needed a good pilot.” The Void Phantom accelerated to its top vacuum speed, diving at the swirl of icy shards orbiting the rocky planet. “Good thing I’m great.”

  “Kat, I already think you’re great!” Orion said. “You don’t have to prove anything to me!”

  Orion winced, ready to be dashed to stardust as the crescent-shaped ship entered the silent storm of debris. Gripping the navigation wheel hard, Vanlith spun the ship to slip it between two rotating slivers of dirty rock that were miles wide. The Blue Comets from Wormrock Penitentiary tried to follow, firing pulse cannons and thermite missiles. For several stomach-churning minutes, Vanlith dipped, dove and spun their nimble craft through shards of broken moon, counting off as the enemy pilots miscalculated one by one and got smashed between the rocky fragments. “There’s one down… another… another… last one’s very persistent…”

  Everyone gripped their harnesses, eyes glued to the viewscreen as they narrowly avoided dirty chunks of hurtling death, until Vanlith finally said, “There — rot in pieces, bitches!” and they broke free from the chaotic debris field.

  Orion and the other passengers cheered, but a proximity warning quickly interrupted them. “Damn it!” Vanlith hissed. “Must have launched a missile before he ate it. Prepare for impa—”

  An explosion rocked the Void Phantom, sending it tumbling end over end faster than their inertial dampeners could compensate. The ship’s interior lights failed, and Orion wondered if they would lose compression and die frozen in open space. Yet the ship’s hull held. After a few seconds, the red glow of the emergency life-support systems came on, along with a half-dozen screaming alarms. Everyone took a few deep breaths to compose themselves, and big Zagzebski threw up with a wretch like a dinosaur’s roar.

  “Damage report,” Orion said, “other than the carpet in this thing.”

  Vanlith glanced back at him, mopping blood from her brow where her head had struck the control dash. “Well, we’re alive, so it could be worse.” She silenced the alarms and called up a holographic projection of their ship above her control dash. “We didn’t take a direct hit, so the hull’s okay,” she said as she scanned the green lines. “Minimal propulsion left, but we’re close enough to the ether route to… no!” She slapped the dash in front of her. “Manacite drive is cracked. We’re dead in the water.”

  Strapped into his crash couch, Costigan poked a finger at his new cybernetic eye to make sure it remained in place. “Can we call Mervyn for help? We’re headed for his space yacht anyway.”

  “Afraid we don’t have time for that, soldier.” Vanlith swiveled her chair and pulled up another interface, this one a projection of the furrowed prison planet. “Looks like Wormrock Pen had more alert fighters. Incoming in three minutes.”

  Orion watched the red dots climbing out of the holographic planet’s atmosphere, frantically trying to think of something brilliant to save the day, but Zovaco Ralli calmly unbuckled his harness and started for the back of the cabin.

  “Whoa, Zo, hold up.” Orion hastened out of his own harness. “What are you doing?”

  The thin politician knelt down to the service hatch on the floor and pulled the emergency handle. “You should come with me,” he said, his three clear eyes gazing at Orion. “You should see this.”

  Orion scrambled down the ladder after him, and soon the two of them hustled through the narrow service corridors of the Void Phantom’s complicated inner workings. They dashed between cracked liquid circuits and grinding gears, and soon they reached the sealed room holding the manacite drive. This was the soul of any modern starship, the expensive, Engineer-derived component that let it slip into the ether routes and cross the distance between stars in a matter of hours. Orion and Zovaco forced open the sparking door and stepped inside, waves of heat battering them.

  The huge ball of manacite — refined to the best of modern man’s ability, but not nearly as pure as their spellblades — smoldered with orange fissures. Orion knew enough to recognize that this wasn’t something one repaired with a dab of nano-glue. This kind of damage to the manacite drive made the starship around it worth nothing more than its scrap components. Yet Orion knew that he had to try, so he called his spellblade to the surface and conjured a thin knife.

  “What are you doing, Orion?” Zovaco asked with a gentle smile.

  Orion pushed back the sleeve of his bodysuit and readied the knife. “No choice.” He gritted his teeth as he prepared to kiss at least a decade of his golden years away. “I’ll need plenty of fresh blood if I hope to fix this thing.”

  Zovaco shook his head. “Put your blade away. The Blade of the Word is powerful, but it would drain you dry to repair a manacite drive.”

  “Yeah, I get that.” Orion held the blade to his forearm just above the bubbling consulin patch. “But I’m kind of out of ideas here.”

  “Just watch.” Zovaco reached out with his spellblade gauntlet. “Crag Dur Rokis Crag did not teach you all there is to know about the spellblade
before he forced his on you.”

  The manacite sheath around Zovaco’s four-fingered hand rippled, stretching out toward the cracked silver orb. The liquid metal coursed into the fissures, filling and sealing them, while bit-by-bit the gauntlet drained away from Zovaco’s arm. Even the flesh and bone of Zovaco’s arm ripped away with the last flakes of metal, leaving him with a ragged stump at the elbow. To Orion’s amazement, the manacite drive had been healed.

  A few harried moments later, the Void Phantom disappeared into the ether route, narrowly escaping a hail of thermite missiles.

  Chapter 29

  The next two weeks blurred by for Orion, still so wired from their close escape that he could barely sleep. First, Mervyn released the evidence clearing Zovaco of terrorist acts. Then Jiminia Pau, the tiny briophyte MP called the Little Queen, published the findings of her secret investigation into government corruption. With so much laid bare in the media, Chancellor Claudio the Venerable had no choice. He arrested Curkas Dur Trag Curkar, the incumbent to the seat Zovaco sought, along with two other MPs and a dozen Union reps. Curkas took the fall as the head of the conspiracy to murder and defame Zovaco Ralli, his motive to win the election simple enough for the public to swallow. Orion, Zovaco, and a few others knew that Curkas was nothing more than a lightning rod mounted atop something much larger, but there was nothing they could do to prove it.

  As for Zovaco Ralli, he got a new cybernetic arm — but he didn’t have it grafted on right away. He returned to the public eye and let everyone see how the corrupt powers-that-be had disfigured a man who had only wanted to serve the galactic community. His supporters quickly multiplied when the evidence clearing his name broke, most claiming they had never believed the charges of terrorism in the first place. With Curkas arrested, the other two candidates for the open MP seat looked to be no match for Zovaco Ralli’s hurtling political momentum. As Orion prepared to host a party on the evening of Election Day, Gorbor Gish of Galactic Core News predicted a landslide of historic proportions.

  “Welcome, come on in,” Orion said to his guests as he threw open the frosted-glass doors to the AlphaOmega office. He wore his smartly cut white suit, his hulking black dog stood obediently at his side, and he brimmed with the confidence of a man who’d had seven million Union credits deposited in his account that morning. “The big day for our boy, huh?”

  Friends, comrades and business associates filed past him into the red-and-white marble lobby, the waterfall feature gurgling gently in one corner. Aurelia Deon, Exile of the Green, slinked in clad in a sparkling purple silk wrap. Her otherworldly energy had recovered after a few days, and her sex-vixen glamor was firmly back in place. Kangor Kash lumbered in behind her in his hard-worn leathers, the big vycart twitching with the restlessness that always came on after so many days without a hunt. Jim Costigan and Alana Reddpenning came next dressed in crisp new clothes, the two of them suddenly looking like more than friends. Zagzebski, Seals and Adler milled past Orion with handshakes and smiles and set about denting the first keg of Isek Deep Winter ale. Quartermaster Clynn arrived precisely on time, along with a handful of the other SpaceCorps officers who had survived the wreck of the Star Sentry. As for the non-combatants, Orion’s barber Skagg traded grim stories with the Briarhearts, beers in two of his four hands. His lawyer and accountant, dopey great ape Vlad of Longshore and mousy freyan Eugeo Bentleaf, seemed thrilled to hang out with their newly moneyed client. Koreen held court with her usual profane sass, while Bog Gu’labinate — the sushi chef from Fin & Tail — filled the office lobby with laughter as he sliced thin strips of fire eel and seacow veal at a pop-up counter.

  Zovaco and Mervyn had to be at the Ceremony of Choosing, of course, broadcast live on GCN from the Grand Chambers. The hologram feed in the lobby lounge showed the two of them filing into the Grand Chambers with the other Members of Parliament and galactic reps up for election or re-election. With a chuckle, Orion noted that they assembled atop the freshly painted-over manacite glyphs where the survivors of the Star Sentry had materialized just a few weeks before. With all that had happened at Wormrock Penitentiary, falling through L’yak’s jaunt pond felt like years ago to Orion.

  Only Katherine Vanlith remained absent from the party. Orion hadn’t seen her since they had delivered Zovaco to Mervyn’s space yacht and gone their separate ways, both of them lying low to see how the fallout came down. As Orion filled his plate with sushi rolls and his glass with Rumble Horse whiskey, he wondered what had held her up and why he so itched to see her. Not just to touch her body and taste her kiss, but to be with her — to earn her withering glare with one of his wisecracks, to hear the passion in her voice when she argued her point. He had to admit, he felt differently about her than other women. She was also a fellow human, and despite Orion’s love of exotic alien girls, Kat presented new opportunities for the future. Perhaps for something beyond himself. Someone most definitely not named Orion Grimslade IV.

  Bully trotted at Orion’s side from the sushi station to the three-tiered glass bar and back to the lobby lounge as the early elective votes came in. First the World Walkers, then the Collective Fleet, and then the Hivers declared their voting power for Zovaco. As evening tilted toward night and Synthetic Symphony hummed from the lobby speaker system, more elective votes trickled in from sovereign systems and minor star clusters. When the briophytes declared for Zo near the end of the solar cycle, it all but sealed the deal for their candidate.

  Koreen raised her mug of Isek ale to Orion. “A toast, a toast,” called the gruff old durok. “Don’t you know an occasion like this calls for a toast?”

  “Yes,” said Aureila lustily, looking up from flirting with Seals and Adler on the loveseat. “Let’s hear from our great leader!”

  “Oh no, no way,” Orion said, swigging his glass of caramel-brown whiskey. “I am not making a speech.”

  Kangor rose from his oversized chair and hoisted his two-gallon mug. “You should say your bit, little friend.” He wiped his furry forearm over his foam-spattered snout. “Among the vycart, the warlord gives his voice to the warriors after a successful campaign.”

  The Briarhearts began the cheer slowly, “O-G-3, O-G-3!” The SpaceCorps men and women soon took up the chant, and even Orion’s lawyer and accountant joined in. Bog Gu’labinate’s tentacles drummed the cutting board of his sushi station, Koreen cawed with the others, and even Bully barked out his encouragement. After a few moments, Orion laughed, shook his head and held up a hand in surrender.

  “Okay, okay,” he chuckled, taking a sip of his whiskey to give himself a moment to think. “I didn’t know what I was getting us into when I signed up with Zo and Merv,” he said with an honest shrug. “I knew it was some kind of opportunity. I knew it was some kind of dangerous.” He looked around at each of them, smiling. “But most importantly, I knew that the people I count on were up to any — hold on.”

  Orion felt his datacube buzz in his pocket and drew it out. While he hoped it was Vanlith calling to say she was on her way, he feared it was just his father again, trying to contact him for the tenth time in half as many days. His exploits with Zovaco had been all over the news, after all. Yet Orion’s mismatched eyes went wide when he set the datacube afloat and saw the simple lines of yellow text projected in the air.

  i have your kat. meet me on top of echohax. come alone. i’m watching, i’ll know.

  -ll

  Orion felt as if time slowed, each second stretching like a string of syrup. As he looked around, he saw the smiles fade from the faces of his comrades, their expressions sliding into shock or curdling into rage as they too decoded the message. They started putting down their drinks and straightening up like soldiers. Orion heard Costigan ordering his people to fetch their weapons, and Quartermaster Clynn was yelling something about air support.

  “No, no,” Orion heard himself say as slow-time snapped back to reality. “If she says she’ll know, she’ll know.” He
walked between them across the lobby and threw open his office door. A datacube floated just outside his floor-to-ceiling windows, its central diode glimmering with blue light as it scanned the AlphaOmega office. “Yeah, she has a thermal-scan body count.”

  Aurelia ran up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “How can you be sure, Orion?”

  “Because that’s exactly what I would do,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Everyone stay put. I’ll have to go solo on this one.”

  Kangor grunted. “You can’t, little friend.”

  “I have to!” Orion barked, his voice echoing off the marble floor.

  An eerie silence fell over Orion’s friends as he marched to the locker room alone. When he emerged clad in his kinetic bodysuit and blue-gray smartcloak, they greeted him with somber nods and severe expressions. He walked between them with a cocky smirk forced to his face, and both Briarhearts and SpaceCorps officers muttered encouragement and bumped knuckles with him as he went. Koreen gripped his shoulders and chanted a terse durok blessing, Costigan shook his hand, and Aurelia merely returned his easy smile. Kangor and Bully met him at the door, the two hefty creatures blocking his way.

  “Take my blood with you, little friend.” Kangor struck out his thickly corded forearm. “Fuel your demon metal, and give the faceless woman the death she deserves.”

  “You know it can’t be volunteered, big guy,” Orion said with a shake of his head. “Only taken or sacrificed. Besides, I can beat her with the blade alone.”

  Kangor glowered down at him. “Are you sure?”

  Orion flexed his hand and brought forth his spiked gauntlet. “She’s not going to ambush me with lightning or catch me in a snare, not this time. This time,” he said in a low voice, “we’ll be face-to-face. And I’ll show her everything that old durok taught me.”